Das Reich (23 page)

Macdonald Austin, universally known as ‘Mac’, was a quiet-spoken southerner who failed to win a regular West Point cadetship before the war, and was studying accountancy at the University of Florida with a reserve commission when he was suddenly summoned to active duty. One day in 1943, at the age of twenty-six, he was instructing parachute infantry at a vast tented camp of 100,000 men in Georgia when a mysterious civilian from Washington arrived. The man interviewed Austin and several other jump-qualified officers. His file showed that he had some high school French; was he interested in volunteering for a dangerous mission that involved being dropped deep behind
enemy lines in France? He was. The volunteers were shipped to Washington, where an extraordinary selection process took place. A French-speaking captain announced in French: ‘All those who can understand what I’m saying go to the end of the room.’ Austin and about half the others moved smartly. They were considered sufficiently proficient to train as guerillas for France. The failures were sent on language courses.

In the weeks that followed, about half Austin’s companions were weeded out in training. Those who were left were amused and bemused by the OSS passion for melodramatics. Their school was situated at the Congressional Country Club outside Washington, and whenever they went into the city, the students were given strict orders not to move publicly in groups. The notion of secrecy, of unobtrusiveness, seemed alien and funny to the young officers. Even as they plunged through the two-week commando course at Arisaig in Scotland, and afterwards during initial Jedburgh training at Hatherop Castle in Gloucestershire, they could not escape a sense of fantasy, even absurdity.

At Milton Hall, where they came together and began their training in earnest, the British and French with their seriousness about the war – and in many cases experience of battle – found the Americans touchingly gauche. After years of stringent rationing, Macpherson and the others ‘were shattered to see bacon, waffles, marmalade, scrambled eggs provided because we had an American contingent. And they had this mania for surrounding themselves with weapons.’ The Americans, with their easy conversation and high poker games, found most of the Frenchmen tense and uncommunicative. Experienced British officers like Tommy Macpherson were effectively honorary instructors. Harry Coombe-Tennant had also escaped from Germany. Geoffrey Hallowes had survived ten days in a rowing boat, adrift off Sumatra. One elderly trainee who was thought to be too well known to be allowed to drop into France had his face altered by plastic surgery while on leave, and returned claiming that he had been in a car smash.

These men were bemused by such exotic American recruits as René Dusacq, who had been a Hollywood stuntman; Prince Serge Obolensky, a former New York socialite; ‘Baz’ Bazata, a red-haired adventurer who addressed all colonels as ‘sugar’; and several near-gangsters. There were some good ex-West Point regulars, and serious students such as William Colby, future head of the CIA, who spent much of his spare time at Milton Hall pouring over
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. But while the British admired American organization and equipment, they doubted whether they possessed the instinct for improvisation in the field. Many seemed to be acting out a role. ‘The great thing in this game is that you may have a letter in your pocket signed personally by De Gaulle – as we all did when we landed in France,’ said Tommy Macpherson, ‘but you are in fact, in yourself, nothing. Success depends on the moral hold you can establish upon the people you are working with.’

Brigadier Mockler-Ferryman, commanding Special Forces HQ, came down to address them. Denis Rake, a wonderfully courageous and unashamedly high camp F Section wireless operator, delivered a brilliant and witty talk about life in Occupied France. The French treated all their training with desperate earnestness. ‘They were very conscious of the débâcle of 1940,’ said Geoffrey Hallowes. ‘The idea that France should be liberated without their help was intolerable to them.’

Towards the end of the spring, the ‘mating period’ began. The students were told to sort themselves into pairs, and to choose an NCO wireless operator. Macpherson took Bourdon, whom he liked although he found him very immature and desperately anxious to prove his courage. Sergeant Brown, their wireless operator, was a tall, fair Londoner with no battle experience and no French, but technically highly competent. ‘Mac’ Austin teamed himself with a former regular French Army gunner, Raymond Leconte, a roundfaced man who seemed slow-witted, but was in reality extremely sharp. Their wireless operator, Jack Berlin, was a thickset,
bespectacled eighteen-year-old Jewish boy from Brooklyn who had worked his way through high school, and regarded the war as a personal crusade.

Early in April 1944, there was one of the endless wartime ‘flaps’ at Milton. Without warning, fifteen teams were detailed to move to North Africa. Austin, Macpherson and the others found themselves trans-shipped to Oran on the liner
Capetown Castle
, and thence into the Algerian mountains for joint exercises with French commandos and Spahis to sharpen their wits before action. The Frenchmen among them exulted to be once more on their own soil. Michel de Bourbon met his father, Prince René, who was serving with the Foreign Legion. His sister, the ex-Queen of Romania, was driving an ambulance for Leclerc, and his other brother was in the Norwegian Air Force. The Bourbons considered that they had gone some distance towards redeeming themselves from the traditional suspicion of the French nation towards their family.

One night, the teams had been on an exercise high in the mountains, from which they had to march back to a grid coordinate. At 3 am on 5 June 1944, they pulled themselves wearily aboard the pick-up truck and found that they were being driven straight to Blida airfield. Major James Champion of SOE told Austin: ‘You’re going tonight.’ They had a few hours’ sleep, then the long briefing began. Austin was told that he was being dropped to a reception committee of George Starr’s Wheelwright circuit, south of Sarlat. They were taking weapons for two groups of twenty men apiece. For the rest of the day, they rested and prepared their equipment, along with Macpherson’s men, who were also to go that night. All the other teams had been given leave in Algiers so that they should not notice the departure of their colleagues.

That night, however, the teams stood by in vain. SHAEF had insisted that no Jedburgh should be dropped into France in uniform until the moment of invasion. When the landing was postponed for twenty-four hours, so were Austin and Macpherson. To
the intense chagrin of Austin and his team, the following night also ended in anti-climax. Their Halifax failed to locate the dropping zone, and they returned crestfallen to Blida, to face much teasing from their comrades: ‘Did you freeze in the door, then?’ On the night of 8 June they found the dropping zone, but the pilot reported that the reception committee was flashing the wrong code letter. The Jedburgh was more than willing to risk the drop, but the airman was not. Once again they returned to Blida. It was the sort of difficulty that dogged all wartime operational flights by SOE and OSS, and caused such a high proportion of abortive missions, with all the strain and risk both for those in the aircraft and the reception committee on the ground.

By now Henry Hyde, OSS Special Intelligence chief in Algiers, had received a signal from one of his French agents, a regular army major named Jean Lescane, that the Das Reich was moving. Hyde was a lawyer like so many OSS men, twenty-nine, and educated in England at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge. To his chagrin, although he had been born in Paris and was married to a daughter of a French baron, he was turned down for agent training, and took over SI in Algiers instead. Now, the message from Lescane north of Agen was funnelled into the military intelligence machine. Austin was told that there might still be time to interdict the movement of some elements of 2nd SS Panzer.

A few minutes after midnight on 10 June, Austin’s Jedburgh at last saw the green light flash above the exit hole of their Halifax. After the heat and noise of the fuselage, the American was delighted by the cool fresh air and silence of the June night above the Dordogne. He landed neatly, just behind his French colleague, Ray Leconte. A shadowy figure loomed out of the darkness. Austin unburdened himself of the French phrase he had been practising for days for this moment: ‘We’ve come to fight on your side.’

‘So – you’re an American, are you?’ said an unmistakably American voice from the darkness. The
maquisard
was a middle-aged civilian named Dick Andrews who had been brought up in
France, educated at Cornell and served in the US Corps of Engineers in World War I. He was demobbed in France, and settled down to spend the rest of his life in the country. When the Germans took over the Unoccupied Zone in 1943, Andrews sent his family to a safe refuge abroad, and joined a
maquis
.

They cleared the dropping zone and sat down to breakfast on an omelette made from fresh eggs and truffles. Jack Berlin thought some pieces of charcoal from the fire had fallen into his omelette, and carefully picked out the truffles and put them beside his plate. It was also Berlin’s misfortune to dislike wine, which caused him some privation in the weeks ahead. There was nothing else to drink.

Austin began to get the measure of the
résistants
, and of the situation in the area. He was astonished to discover that the Germans were nowhere to be seen, and that the
maquisards
moved freely along the roads by
gazogène
and truck. The French talked much and bitterly about the German atrocities, but in the peace of the woods south of the Dordogne it was hard for the Americans to be infected by their anger. They found it impossible to hate the enemy. Later, when they saw a few prisoners, Austin found that he felt only curiosity. Among the
maquisards
, those with military training responded readily enough to his proposals, but the remainder were difficult to influence and impossible to order. He found his high school French confounded by their heavily accented slang. It is a measure of the isolation of the different
maquis
that this one, commanded by a Sarlatais named Albert, seemed to know nothing about the Das Reich, or about the dramatic situation unfolding not far westwards, around Bergerac. Austin proposed that they should establish some roadblocks, but the idea met with little enthusiasm, and anyway there was little enemy traffic. On the one occasion that they went to reconnoitre the Brive–Montauban road, they saw no sign of movement. Leconte started to travel the countryside setting charges on small bridges and culverts that it seemed useful to destroy. Austin began to instruct Albert’s men in the use of the weapons that he had
brought. There was one unseemly interruption, when the
maquisards
tortured a local man they had brought in, suspected of treachery. He died, and they sent apologetic word to his father. The man was not appeased, and passed word to the Germans, giving the location of the little château by the river where the group was based. The Americans were elsewhere when the German armoured cars arrived. The
maquisards
beat a hasty retreat, the Germans burned the château, and thereafter they all lived in the woods. To his astonishment, Austin found himself desperately wishing that he had brought some books to read. Of all his apprehensions before he parachuted into France, the prospect of boredom had never been among them.

Austin learnt a great deal about guerillas in the weeks that followed – above all about their absolute unpredictability. He moved westwards and began attacking railways himself. On one notable day he was up a ladder fixing an explosive charge to the Bordeaux–Agen line beneath a bridge. He had posted a Bren gunner to cover him, a hundred yards up the track. Suddenly, he found a German bicycle patrol dismounting a stone’s throw up the road, and opening a furious fire. The
maquis
party escaped in confusion, but intact. Austin learned that the Bren gunner, lulled by the hot sun, had simply gone to sleep: ‘Sometimes they would do marvellous things,’ he said, ‘but one had to realize that on the next operation it would suddenly turn out that they had forgotten to crank up the
gazogène
.’

Fundamentally, from the moment that he landed Austin found himself unable to carry out the job that he had been sent to do, because of the lack of Intelligence and enthusiasm among the
maquis
, and the feud between the Wheelwright circuit and the
maquis
of Soleil and the AS, armed by Poirier, which kept him ignorant and isolated for many days. Above all, the Jedburgh had come too late. The strategic decision to send the teams on D-Day may have made sense for security reasons, but was a critical handicap in tactical terms, on the ground. No man could arrive in the middle of France without previous combat experience or
knowledge of the country and immediately conduct a coherent military campaign. For all their courage and enthusiasm to get into action, Austin and his colleagues were at a loss: ‘I didn’t really know what to do. The target that I was to go after wasn’t there any longer. I thought that the best thing I could do was to get on with training the
maquisards
, and go round the country meeting people until I could formulate some sort of plan. It was not what I expected it to be . . .’

Major Tommy Macpherson jumped from his Halifax over the Corrèze on the night of 8 June with the overwhelming advantage that he spoke competent French and possessed the confidence of a man with great experience of battle and of life behind enemy lines. He had long ago shed his 1941 ‘infinite capacity for belief in the infallibility of planners’. He landed into the hands of an AS leader named Bernard Cournil, who was mayor of the tiny village of Le Rouget and owned a local garage. Macpherson gave Cournil the codename of the
maquis
leader he had been instructed to contact – ‘Droite’. The Frenchman said that he had never heard of him. He himself controlled only a small group of poorly armed
résistants
, and was delighted to have suddenly acquired his own personal Allied mission. Bourdon did not much interest him – the French boy seemed disappointingly young, and was obviously from an entirely alien social background. Sergeant Brown, the wireless operator, spoke no French at all, and found himself condemned to spend most of his stay in France making tea beneath damp parachute canopies in the woods, between radio schedules. Macpherson made his own assessment of the situation: